Saturday, December 14, 2013

Animated Future?

When President Obama visited DreamWorks recently, he was given a tour of the studio and shown how they are using mo-cap technology. Here is a clip showing how this process works, notice the actors are lip syncing the dialogue to get into the performance.

When I first saw this, I thought I would have to start working out more to fit into one of those tight mo-cap suits, in order to become an Animator of the Future! Or as an Animator, my future tasks would be cleaning up motion capture data and animating key frames with a graph editor, while the mo-cap actors would get to create the performance.

Most videogame studios would choose this route, because it is faster than an Animator can come up with an animated performance without using mo-cap. However DreamWorks is using this process as a first-stage of blocking out a scene in order to figure out character placement, camera movement or basic staging for acting. Animators could use this information as they would a reference video or animatic, a tool for performance, but not replacing their animating ability completely.

Kids growing up with animation are seeing more 3D animated films than 2D ones. Which artform do you enjoy watching more?